CHENNAI: Lady Luck has a game show. She turns the contestants into 6-sided dice and puts them in fancy costumes. I am first handed the warrior-shaped die and nudged into a dungeon. The warrior rolls towards the silly-looking enemies. The game is an absurd experience — it’s equal parts ridiculous and calculated strategy. Picture this: you are forced to roll the dice to decide the fate of a battle. But then it’s not all luck — there’s also tiny calculations that could affect the outcomes. What items must be equipped? Is it more efficient to use the higher die roll on a rusty sword over a power crystal?
Lady Luck is smart. She realises that you are getting bored after the first couple of levels. What happens next? She animates more dice. I soon meet the thief, the witch, the inventor, and the robot. Dicey Dungeons is creative with adding complexity to these new characters. The inventor for example, is also self-destructive. A counter-intuitive idea, but the character purposefully destroys an invention to make room for another gadget after each fight.
The other characters are no less weird. The witch assigns a number to each of the spells learnt. Rolling the number on the available dice would enable that power. Each of these characters have unique “limit breaks”, or as I’d like to call it — “rage mode”. Luck isn’t always favourable, and these limit breaks provide interesting bonuses to the character to give them an edge. For example, the warrior unleashes a furious string of attacks, and the inventors dice rolls all turn into six-es. Now as you would assume, once the novelty of the characters wears out, the game could potentially get a bit tiresome.
But Lady Luck knows all. She introduces new upgrades and items in treasure crates at each level. I once made the thief drink a bear potion. A sentence I never thought I’d type, but the thief-shaped die turns into a bear-shaped die and now mauls all the enemies till they collapse. For a story that features dice participating in a tortuous game show, the general vibe is chipper.
It’s been over two years since the game released, but the developer has continued to improvise Lady Luck’s winding dungeons. The bonus episodes of her game show include a Halloween Special and a Reunion. While it has been available on the PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch an even Android and iOS, the game released for the PlayStation this month.